The core Office for Mac applications of Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, can do just about everything their Windows counterparts can.

Unfortunately the new Outlook for Mac is still missing a few features compared to the Windows version, which happen to be a big deal in my environment. It can't create contact groups (ie mailing lists) on the server. It can only create them in the local Outlook database. It doesn't have delayed/scheduled send for e-mail. You can't tell it to send a message out at some particular date and time in the future. Instead you have to save the e-mail as a draft, then log in and send it manually at the time you want it sent. Which can be a problem if you want it sent in the middle of the night, or when you're going to be somewhere with limited, intermittent, poor, or nonexistent Internet service.

It also seems to still download and cache all e-mail, going back to the dawn of time (or the account, whichever), without any way to set a limit like the Windows version (which we have set to one year in my environment). In most cases that shouldn't be a problem, but in combination with the local-only contact groups issue, having to back up and restore potentially hundreds of enormous Outlook databases when we re-image or replace Macs is not going to be fun. Especially when we're talking about tenured faculty who either think you're speaking an unknown language when you ask "do you have any local content?" or think it's beneath them to know anything about that because that's your job as one of those non-PhD staff peons.

So yeah. The new Outlook client is absolutely an improvement. But it's also still the red-headed step child.

"Ready for prime time"? Give us a screenshot of the Visual Basic Editor from Excel and I'll tell you if that's a BS statement or not. If it hasn't changed from the VBE in 15.11.1, then this thing is most assuredly not ready for prime time. The VBE in 15.11.1 pretty much has everything useful stripped out. Excel 2011 is way more capable in this regard.

How about typeface display? If you compare Office 2011 with the 15.11.1 Preview versions, typeface display is noticeably degraded in the shiny new version. That is not acceptable (note: making this comparison on a non-Retina iMac, so if riMac is fine, but non-riMac isn't, that still won't fly).

Can keyboard shortcuts and the ribbon be customized in the 15.11.2 versions? Enquiring minds want to know.

Disappointingly, only the keyboard can be customized (at least in word). I guess more memorization for me in terms of keyboard shortcuts (I have about 8 events I use all day long, and in prior versions 4 of them were keyboard shortcuts and the other ones were ribbon addons) /mike

The core Office for Mac applications of Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, can do just about everything their Windows counterparts can.

Unfortunately the new Outlook for Mac is still missing a few features compared to the Windows version, which happen to be a big deal in my environment. It can't create contact groups (ie mailing lists) on the server. It can only create them in the local Outlook database. It doesn't have delayed/scheduled send for e-mail. You can't tell it to send a message out at some particular date and time in the future. Instead you have to save the e-mail as a draft, then log in and send it manually at the time you want it sent. Which can be a problem if you want it sent in the middle of the night, or when you're going to be somewhere with limited, intermittent, poor, or nonexistent Internet service.

It also seems to still download and cache all e-mail, going back to the dawn of time (or the account, whichever), without any way to set a limit like the Windows version (which we have set to one year in my environment). In most cases that shouldn't be a problem, but in combination with the local-only contact groups issue, having to back up and restore potentially hundreds of enormous Outlook databases when we re-image or replace Macs is not going to be fun. Especially when we're talking about tenured faculty who either think you're speaking an unknown language when you ask "do you have any local content?" or think it's beneath them to know anything about that because that's your job as one of those non-PhD staff peons.

So yeah. The new Outlook client is absolutely an improvement. But it's also still the red-headed step child.

You mean it functions just like th old Outlook Client. All they did was change SOME of the looks and functions. They seemed to leave the backbone of the application the same even though they needed to change it.

Why or why do they need to create two dozen different calendar categories for me and then not let me delete some of them (I am looking at you Junk). Why can I not change the navigation buttons in the bottom left corner to the compact one like in windows? Why did they leave the annoying options window and groups the same?

Is OneNote still requires OneDrive to work? I love OneNote on Windows but no local storage on Mac makes it a deal breaker. I have been hoping to dump Evernote and finally move to OneNote on all platforms.

Seriously, make OneNote to support local storage and just take my money.

I wrote to Microsoft immediately following each beta update regarding this through their feedback function. They have never implemented the "Detect Language Automatically" feature in the OSX version of the product.

The way they have it now, if you are working in more than one language, you need to fight with the computer to accept each new fragment of text. This is very tedious and unnecessary for language departments at universities - or anyone who might be editing a bilingual document for any reason at all - and it seems like OSX provides the language list functionality built-in (whereas they rely on a funky "Office Language Preferences" panel in Windows). With OSX, you could just add all of the languages you work with into that pool and then Office could theoretically detect which language it is (which was easy years ago and continues to be easy).

Some people have been complaining about the size of the new files compared with the previous versions. At least part of that size is due to the fact that all the translations for Office are built into the apps, whereas in the past, you had to actually get a different version of Office and install that one. Now you can just use your Region / Language panel to make the changes.

Some people have been complaining about the size of the new files compared with the previous versions. At least part of that size is due to the fact that all the translations for Office are built into the apps, whereas in the past, you had to actually get a different version of Office and install that one. Now you can just use your Region / Language panel to make the changes.

Each app is now self-contained and there are no more shared resources. While nothing has been confirmed, the only legitimate reason to do this is to prep it for the Mac App Store. I'll expect that in September for the non-O365 people launch.

Other Outlook issues that continue on:- Calendars still are limited to Exchange calendars-good luck trying to compare calendars with your iCloud/CalDAV-account-using friends/family/clients/customers/schools.- Replying to a message in your Sent mail addresses it to you (but reply all addresses to the original recipients). Doesn't make sense from a usability standpoint. Or they could just add a "Resend" option.- The "From:" dropdown still shows every account to whom I'm connected: so if Jack shares his Calendar with me, his name shows up in the From menu when Composing emails. Ridiculous (I share calendars with a dozen people, and use three shared accounts, so I need to go up and filter through 15 names to get the few I need).- Shift-CMD-F (Advanced Find) still puts the cursor in the top search field away from the Advanced search fields. O- Sharing Contacts and Calendars still appears to be an all or nothing affair.- Categories coloring is now just small little bars-not too visually useful (if it wasn't meant to be used visually, why assign colors?).- Can't share Calendars or Contacts with Groups- would be so much simpler if I could just say "Share my Calendar RO with all employees" and "RW with Admins" and let that manage who can do what rather than me needing to add them one-by-one and manually modifying permissions.

There's more, but these are all pretty big and some should be really easy to knock out.

If Mail.app supported the Shared mailboxes I'd be perfectly fine using it instead-as it is I have to use BusyCal for calendaring anyway. Microsoft-buy them and integrate their stuff into Outlook (OK don't it is a pretty useful program to everyone). And I would love if Contacts worked like BusyContacts so I could see all texts and emails (and add Skype/Lync messages too!) in the Contact info.

I'll second the complaint about Outlook. The rest of Office 16 seems up to par, but Outlook still lags far behind the Windows version. It's actually caused me to switch to OS X's Calendar as my primary home calendar (obviously I still use Outlook for work, but that's on a Windows machine.)

It also seems to still download and cache all e-mail, going back to the dawn of time (or the account, whichever), without any way to set a limit like the Windows version (which we have set to one year in my environment). In most cases that shouldn't be a problem, but in combination with the local-only contact groups issue, having to back up and restore potentially hundreds of enormous Outlook databases when we re-image or replace Macs is not going to be fun. Especially when we're talking about tenured faculty who either think you're speaking an unknown language when you ask "do you have any local content?" or think it's beneath them to know anything about that because that's your job as one of those non-PhD staff peons.

Huh?

You don't need to restore any mail on a *client* if you are using cached mode in Outlook. All the mail still resides in their Exchange mailbox. The client will just download all their mail again (in the background) the next time they connect to Exchange. Nothing is lost. Assuming you don't let them use PSTs.

Or are you not using Exchange? And if you are not using Exchange, why are you using Outlook? Outlook sucks as an email client unless you use it with Exchange, and then it becomes pretty great.

I also wish they'd port Visio across. I don't mind Omnigraffle, but even with the latest Pro version it doesn't do a great job if you need to exchange documents with people who do use Visio. We just did a large test at work and had a lot of problems.

At least this version of the Office suite is a reasonably good upgrade from the older version.

I wrote to Microsoft immediately following each beta update regarding this through their feedback function. They have never implemented the "Detect Language Automatically" feature in the OSX version of the product.

The way they have it now, if you are working in more than one language, you need to fight with the computer to accept each new fragment of text. This is very tedious and unnecessary for language departments at universities - or anyone who might be editing a bilingual document for any reason at all - and it seems like OSX provides the language list functionality built-in (whereas they rely on a funky "Office Language Preferences" panel in Windows). With OSX, you could just add all of the languages you work with into that pool and then Office could theoretically detect which language it is (which was easy years ago and continues to be easy).

Some people have been complaining about the size of the new files compared with the previous versions. At least part of that size is due to the fact that all the translations for Office are built into the apps, whereas in the past, you had to actually get a different version of Office and install that one. Now you can just use your Region / Language panel to make the changes.

This is interesting because while Mac OS X 10.10 definitely has a number of APIs to do this, I'm not sure if they can be integrated into the Win32 wrappers Mac Office is based on.

It's also one of the main reasons Mac Office hasn't supported complex scripts (or right to left languages) in the past. The Win32 source in Mac Office seems very old and the Win32 Uniscribe used in Mac Office doesn't appear to support nearly any non-dead simple writing system (or right to left, because RTL that isn't a complex script like Arabic is still very simple)